Ghost Cities

April 22, 2014

An estimated 64 million new residences are currently vacant, built to promote China’s GDP but not attracting enough affluent buyers. Without jobs, there is little incentive to move to these cities, which at best have 20-25% occupancy–Ordos, Zengzhou, Baihai, Tianducheng, Tieling, Lanzhou New Area, and more. In Lanzhou 700 mountains are being leveled to create the new metropolis. The speaker in this video calls them “the modern equivalent of building the pyramids”: